Project Homeless Connect provides a cornucopia of services for homeless and low-income people
Tuesday, March 22 dawned cold but cloudless in Santa Cruz. The reprieve from five days of rain was a gift for three homeless men waiting outside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

One of the men huddled under a blue sleeping bag, beneath a sign announcing the Second Annual Project Homeless Connect. “There’s going to be a long line,” he replied when asked why he was there three hours before the doors opened.

Inside the auditorium, dozens of volunteers were busy hanging posters above 40 booths that offered free services for homeless people, including help with employment, housing, driver’s licenses, and medical/dental care. The volunteers—representing local government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and churches—totaled more than 440 by the day’s end.  The volunteer pool included 150 professional service providers; others served as escorts.

Local therapist wins award for sexual health work in Uganda
The people of Uganda don’t believe there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In their version of the myth, if you touch the rainbow, you die. Local family and sex therapist Melissa Fritchle was working in Uganda when her students told her this story, and it had a deep poignancy for her. “We talked about how interesting it is that even something beautiful is a fear story,” she says. “Those kinds of cultural stories carry through and it means something. What we tell ourselves a rainbow means, says a lot.”

As she describes her experience in Uganda, it’s hard not to see the rainbow as a metaphor for some Ugandan attitudes toward sex and sexuality—attitudes Fritchle worked to shape and inform during her month there. In February 2010, she helped to create Uganda’s first human sexuality curriculum for professionals, and she trained counselors to lead discussions about sexuality.

Unique group’s fundraiser aims to help protect young victims of abuse
Mark Kastner owns a black Harley Davidson Dyna Glide and rides his bike under the road name “Joker.” With his tall frame, piercing blue eyes, and gray goatee, he looks like he would fit right in with any group of bikers cruising up and around Highway 17.

A proposed surf school ordinance aims to lighten the crowds at Cowell’s
With its ideal surfing conditions, Cowell's Beach is the perfect place for beginners to learn the sport. It’s also the only beach in the City of Santa Cruz surf schools can take their students.

Instructors and students keep mostly to the inside, taking on the gentle waist-to-shoulder high waves that form against a small triangular sandbar near the rocks, while more experienced surfers stay to the outside. Current regulations in surf school permits limit the total number of students in the water from all schools to 36 at a time; however, with large groups of local surfers vying against tourists and students for waves, some say long summer days turn Cowell's into an overcrowded nightmare.

Second annual Project Homeless Connect builds community connections and provides services for local homeless
Lin Colavin lights up when she talks about volunteering with Project Homeless Connect. An energetic grandmother of three and soup kitchen volunteer who’s lived in Santa Cruz for 37 years, Colavin doesn’t lack human connection. Yet the interactions she had at last year’s event inspired her to get more involved this year. “My experience was one of meeting people that I would’ve never had the opportunity to meet,” she recalls. “I came away feeling so enriched.”

Where does food go when sell-by or expiration dates take it off of the shelves?

There I was on a Saturday afternoon in one of Santa Cruz’s many natural foods markets, awaiting the arrival of my vegetarian sandwich. My pangs of hunger quickly turned to confusion as I watched an employee behind the counter dutifully unwrap plastic-wrapped sandwiches and deposit the wrappers in the recycling and the seemingly edible sandwiches in the compost bin.

‘How could this be?’ I thought, wondering if I could ask for one of the discarded sandwiches instead of the fresh one I had just ordered. Nearly one in four Santa Cruz County children are struggling with hunger according to Second Harvest Food Bank (SHFB), which has seen annual rises in need for food assistance each year since 2005. Was this routine of tossing unsold food really a part of the store’s sustainability mission?

The fact that this incident took place in an establishment that touts its environmental ethic was even more perplexing to me. While recycling the packaging and composting leftovers is a responsible method of handling waste, I had to wonder why good food was being wasted in the first place. So often, particularly in the sustainable food mecca that is Santa Cruz, the emphasis lies in where our food comes from. Less often considered, though, is the fate of that food when it doesn’t end up going through the checkout line.

Thirteenth annual youth symposium addresses teen bullying and gang involvement

Six months after graduating with honors from UC Davis in 1995, Santa Cruz-raised Jon Ervin Nadherny took his own life. Some time into coping with the tragedy, his mother, Linda Calciano, realized she wanted to turn her grief into a way to help prevent other youths from meeting a similar fate. In tandem with Dominican Hospital, she founded the Jon E. Nadherny/Calciano Memorial Youth Symposium in 1997.

“I knew that I wanted to do something in the memory of my son and felt we could reach as many people as possible in the community with something educational—a symposium where we would bring experts in and professionals in,” says Calciano.

The event works to educate attendees via the insight of featured experts on strategies and interventions regarding issues that confront young people.

Planned Parenthood, the Pence Amendment, and pro-life prayers
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte (PPMM) services 29 counties in California and 13 in Nevada, and sees more than 250,000 patients each year. Annually, there are around 24,000 visits to the Santa Cruz location and 16,600 to the Watsonville clinic.

But, according to Fran Linkin, associate director of Public Affairs for PPMM, these figures are “on the low end,” and the clinics have an increasing patient load because of the downturned economy. “We’ve been seeing more and more people as people lose their insurance, or lose their jobs,” she says. “People are really turning to us when they don’t know where to go.”

Linkin says that the most common services sought at Planned Parenthood clinics are “basic reproductive healthcare services, such as contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, STD screenings and treatments, pregnancy testing, HIV testing and UTI testing and treatments.” These services, known as preventive healthcare, along with primary child and adult healthcare, prenatal care, and LGBT services, make up 97 percent of what Planned Parenthoods do. But it is the remaining three percent that gets the most attention and criticism: abortions.

UCSC public records show that the school spent $6,000 to document student protests
UC Santa Cruz undergraduate Tom Pazo recently received a public records document he requested from the university nearly seven months ago. The returned record consists of two pages: an invoice from private investigator Scott H. Newby for $6,000, and UCSC’s receipt of purchase of Newby’s services to document a student demonstration on May 18 and 19, 2010.

According to the invoice, UCSC contracted Newby for 24 hours at $100 per hour, including post-production and transportation fees from San Jose to Santa Cruz. The May 18 and 19 demonstration  to which the invoice refers was a UCSC Strike Committee-led event entitled “Walk Out to Your Education.” The Strike Committee, a self-defined open collective and coalition of students, graduate students, workers and professors organizing in defense of public education, intended the event as an alternative way to draw general attention toward, and educate students about, the unstable budget situation at UCSC.